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THE GHOST OF ART
I AM a bachelor, residing in rather a dreary set of chambers in the
Temple. They are situated in a square court of high houses, which
would be a complete well, but for the want of water and the absence
of a bucket. I live at the top of the house, among the tiles and
sparrows. Like the little man in the nursery-story, I live by
myself, and all the bread and cheese I get - which is not much - I
put upon a shelf. I need scarcely add, perhaps, that I am in love,
and that the father of my charming Julia objects to our union.
I mention these little particulars as I might deliver a letter of
introduction. The reader is now acquainted with me, and perhaps
will condescend to listen to my narrative.
I am naturally of a dreamy turn of mind; and my abundant leisure -
for I am called to the Bar - coupled with much lonely listening to
the twittering of sparrows, and the pattering of rain, has
encouraged that disposition. In my 'top set' I hear the wind howl
on a winter night, when the man on the ground floor believes it is
perfectly still weather. The dim lamps with which our Honourable
Society (supposed to be as yet unconscious of the new discovery
called Gas) make the horrors of the staircase visible, deepen the
gloom which generally settles on my soul when I go home at night.
I am in the Law, but not of it. I can't exactly make out what it
means. I sit in Westminster Hall sometimes (in character) from ten
to four; and when I go out of Court, I don't know whether I am
standing on my wig or my boots.
It appears to me (I mention this in confidence) as if there were
too much talk and too much law - as if some grains of truth were
started overboard into a tempestuous sea of chaff.
All this may make me mystical. Still, I am confident that what I
am going to describe myself as having seen and heard, I actually
did see and hear.
It is necessary that I should observe that I have a great delight
in pictures. I am no painter myself, but I have studied pictures
and written about them. I have seen all the most famous pictures
in the world; my education and reading have been sufficiently
general to possess me beforehand with a knowledge of most of the
subjects to which a Painter is likely to have recourse; and,
although I might be in some doubt as to the rightful fashion of the
scabbard of King Lear's sword, for instance, I think I should know
King Lear tolerably well, if I happened to meet with him.
I go to all the Modern Exhibitions every season, and of course I
revere the Royal Academy. I stand by its forty Academical articles
almost as firmly as I stand by the thirty-nine Articles of the
Church of England. I am convinced that in neither case could there
be, by any rightful possibility, one article more or less.
It is now exactly three years - three years ago, this very month -
since I went from Westminster to the Temple, one Thursday
afternoon, in a cheap steamboat. The sky was black, when I
imprudently walked on board. It began to thunder and lighten
immediately afterwards, and the rain poured down in torrents. The
deck seeming to smoke with the wet, I went below; but so many
passengers were there, smoking too, that I came up again, and
buttoning my pea-coat, and standing in the shadow of the paddle-
box, stood as upright as I could, and made the best of it.
It was at this moment that I first beheld the terrible Being, who
is the subject of my present recollections.
Standing against the funnel, apparently with the intention of
drying himself by the heat as fast as he got wet, was a shabby man
in threadbare black, and with his hands in his pockets, who
fascinated me from the memorable instant when I caught his eye.
Where had I caught that eye before? Who was he? Why did I connect
him, all at once, with the Vicar of Wakefield, Alfred the Great,
Gil Blas, Charles the Second, Joseph and his Brethren, the Fairy
Queen, Tom Jones, the Decameron of Boccaccio, Tam O'Shanter, the
Marriage of the Doge of Venice with the Adriatic, and the Great
Plague of London? Why, when he bent one leg, and placed one hand
upon the back of the seat near him, did my mind associate him
wildly with the words, 'Number one hundred and forty-two, Portrait
of a gentleman'? Could it be that I was going mad?
I looked at him again, and now I could have taken my affidavit that
he belonged to the Vicar of Wakefield's family. Whether he was the
Vicar, or Moses, or Mr. Burchill, or the Squire, or a
conglomeration of all four, I knew not; but I was impelled to seize
him by the throat, and charge him with being, in some fell way,
connected with the Primrose blood. He looked up at the rain, and
then - oh Heaven! - he became Saint John. He folded his arms,
resigning himself to the weather, and I was frantically inclined to
address him as the Spectator, and firmly demand to know what he had
done with Sir Roger de Coverley.
The frightful suspicion that I was becoming deranged, returned upon
me with redoubled force. Meantime, this awful stranger,
inexplicably linked to my distress, stood drying himself at the
funnel; and ever, as the steam rose from his clothes, diffusing a
mist around him, I saw through the ghostly medium all the people I
have mentioned, and a score more, sacred and profane.
I am conscious of a dreadful inclination that stole upon me, as it
thundered and lightened, to grapple with this man, or demon, and
plunge him over the side. But, I constrained myself - I know not
how - to speak to him, and in a pause of the storm, I crossed the
deck, and said:
'What are you?'
He replied, hoarsely, 'A Model.'
'A what?' said I.
'A Model,' he replied. 'I sets to the profession for a bob a-
hour.' (All through this narrative I give his own words, which are
indelibly imprinted on my memory.)
The relief which this disclosure gave me, the exquisite delight of
the restoration of my confidence in my own sanity, I cannot
describe. I should have fallen on his neck, but for the
consciousness of being observed by the man at the wheel.
'You then,' said I, shaking him so warmly by the hand, that I wrung
the rain out of his coat-cuff, 'are the gentleman whom I have so
frequently contemplated, in connection with a high-backed chair
with a red cushion, and a table with twisted legs.'
'I am that Model,' he rejoined moodily, 'and I wish I was anything
else.'
'Say not so,' I returned. 'I have seen you in the society of many
beautiful young women;' as in truth I had, and always (I now
remember) in the act of making the most of his legs.
'No doubt,' said he. 'And you've seen me along with warses of
flowers, and any number of table-kivers, and antique cabinets, and
warious gammon.'
'Sir?' said I.
'And warious gammon,' he repeated, in a louder voice. 'You might
have seen me in armour, too, if you had looked sharp. Blessed if I
ha'n't stood in half the suits of armour as ever came out of
Pratt's shop: and sat, for weeks together, a-eating nothing, out of
half the gold and silver dishes as has ever been lent for the
purpose out of Storrses, and Mortimerses, or Garrardses, and
Davenportseseses.'
Excited, as it appeared, by a sense of injury, I thought he would
never have found an end for the last word. But, at length it
rolled sullenly away with the thunder.
'Pardon me,' said I, 'you are a well-favoured, well-made man, and
yet - forgive me - I find, on examining my mind, that I associate
you with - that my recollection indistinctly makes you, in short -
excuse me - a kind of powerful monster.'
'It would be a wonder if it didn't,' he said. 'Do you know what my
points are?'
'No,' said I.
'My throat and my legs,' said he. 'When I don't set for a head, I
mostly sets for a throat and a pair of legs. Now, granted you was
a painter, and was to work at my throat for a week together, I
suppose you'd see a lot of lumps and bumps there, that would never
be there at all, if you looked at me, complete, instead of only my
throat. Wouldn't you?'
'Probably,' said I, surveying him.
'Why, it stands to reason,' said the Model. 'Work another week at
my legs, and it'll be the same thing. You'll make 'em out as
knotty and as knobby, at last, as if they was the trunks of two old
trees. Then, take and stick my legs and throat on to another man's
body, and you'll make a reg'lar monster. And that's the way the
public gets their reg'lar monsters, every first Monday in May, when
the Royal Academy Exhibition opens.'
'You are a critic,' said I, with an air of deference.
'I'm in an uncommon ill humour, if that's it,' rejoined the Model,
with great indignation. 'As if it warn't bad enough for a bob a-
hour, for a man to be mixing himself up with that there jolly old
furniter that one 'ud think the public know'd the wery nails in by
this time - or to be putting on greasy old 'ats and cloaks, and
playing tambourines in the Bay o' Naples, with Wesuvius a smokin'
according to pattern in the background, and the wines a bearing
wonderful in the middle distance - or to be unpolitely kicking up
his legs among a lot o' gals, with no reason whatever in his mind
but to show 'em - as if this warn't bad enough, I'm to go and be
thrown out of employment too!'
'Surely no!' said I.
'Surely yes,' said the indignant Model. 'BUT I'LL GROW ONE.'
The gloomy and threatening manner in which he muttered the last
words, can never be effaced from my remembrance. My blood ran
cold.
I asked of myself, what was it that this desperate Being was
resolved to grow. My breast made no response.
I ventured to implore him to explain his meaning. With a scornful
laugh, he uttered this dark prophecy:
'I'LL GROW ONE. AND, MARK MY WORDS, IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!'
We parted in the storm, after I had forced half-a-crown on his
acceptance, with a trembling hand. I conclude that something
supernatural happened to the steamboat, as it bore his reeking
figure down the river; but it never got into the papers.
Two years elapsed, during which I followed my profession without
any vicissitudes; never holding so much as a motion, of course. At
the expiration of that period, I found myself making my way home to
the Temple, one night, in precisely such another storm of thunder
and lightning as that by which I had been overtaken on board the
steamboat - except that this storm, bursting over the town at
midnight, was rendered much more awful by the darkness and the
hour.
As I turned into my court, I really thought a thunderbolt would
fall, and plough the pavement up. Every brick and stone in the
place seemed to have an echo of its own for the thunder. The
waterspouts were overcharged, and the rain came tearing down from
the house-tops as if they had been mountain-tops.
Mrs. Parkins, my laundress - wife of Parkins the porter, then newly
dead of a dropsy - had particular instructions to place a bedroom
candle and a match under the staircase lamp on my landing, in order
that I might light my candle there, whenever I came home. Mrs.
Parkins invariably disregarding all instructions, they were never
there. Thus it happened that on this occasion I groped my way into
my sitting-room to find the candle, and came out to light it.
What were my emotions when, underneath the staircase lamp, shining
with wet as if he had never been dry since our last meeting, stood
the mysterious Being whom I had encountered on the steamboat in a
thunderstorm, two years before! His prediction rushed upon my
mind, and I turned faint.
'I said I'd do it,' he observed, in a hollow voice, 'and I have
done it. May I come in?'
'Misguided creature, what have you done?' I returned.
'I'll let you know,' was his reply, 'if you'll let me in.'
Could it be murder that he had done? And had he been so successful
that he wanted to do it again, at my expense?
I hesitated.
'May I come in?' said he.
I inclined my head, with as much presence of mind as I could
command, and he followed me into my chambers. There, I saw that
the lower part of his face was tied up, in what is commonly called
a Belcher handkerchief. He slowly removed this bandage, and
exposed to view a long dark beard, curling over his upper lip,
twisting about the corners of his mouth, and hanging down upon his
breast.
'What is this?' I exclaimed involuntarily, 'and what have you
become?'
'I am the Ghost of Art!' said he.
The effect of these words, slowly uttered in the thunder-storm at
midnight, was appalling in the last degree. More dead than alive,
I surveyed him in silence.
'The German taste came up,' said he, 'and threw me out of bread. I
am ready for the taste now.'
He made his beard a little jagged with his hands, folded his arms,
and said,
'Severity!'
I shuddered. It was so severe.
He made his beard flowing on his breast, and, leaning both hands on
the staff of a carpet-broom which Mrs. Parkins had left among my
books, said:
'Benevolence.'
I stood transfixed. The change of sentiment was entirely in the
beard. The man might have left his face alone, or had no face.
The beard did everything.
He lay down, on his back, on my table, and with that action of his
head threw up his beard at the chin.
'That's death!' said he.
He got off my table and, looking up at the ceiling, cocked his
beard a little awry; at the same time making it stick out before
him.
'Adoration, or a vow of vengeance,' he observed.
He turned his profile to me, making his upper lip very bulky with
the upper part of his beard.
'Romantic character,' said he.
He looked sideways out of his beard, as if it were an ivy-bush.
'Jealousy,' said he. He gave it an ingenious twist in the air, and
informed me that he was carousing. He made it shaggy with his
fingers - and it was Despair; lank - and it was avarice: tossed it
all kinds of ways - and it was rage. The beard did everything.
'I am the Ghost of Art,' said he. 'Two bob a-day now, and more
when it's longer! Hair's the true expression. There is no other.
I SAID I'D GROW IT, AND I'VE GROWN IT, AND IT SHALL HAUNT YOU!'
He may have tumbled down-stairs in the dark, but he never walked
down or ran down. I looked over the banisters, and I was alone
with the thunder.
Need I add more of my terrific fate? IT HAS haunted me ever since.
It glares upon me from the walls of the Royal Academy, (except when
MACLISE subdues it to his genius,) it fills my soul with terror at
the British Institution, it lures young artists on to their
destruction. Go where I will, the Ghost of Art, eternally working
the passions in hair, and expressing everything by beard, pursues
me. The prediction is accomplished, and the victim has no rest.
OUT OF TOWN
SITTING, on a bright September morning, among my books and papers
at my open window on the cliff overhanging the sea-beach, I have
the sky and ocean framed before me like a beautiful picture. A
beautiful picture, but with such movement in it, such changes of
light upon the sails of ships and wake of steamboats, such dazzling
gleams of silver far out at sea, such fresh touches on the crisp
wave-tops as they break and roll towards me - a picture with such
music in the billowy rush upon the shingle, the blowing of morning
wind through the corn-sheaves where the farmers' waggons are busy,
the singing of the larks, and the distant voices of children at
play - such charms of sight and sound as all the Galleries on earth
can but poorly suggest.
So dreamy is the murmur of the sea below my window, that I may have
been here, for anything I know, one hundred years. Not that I have
grown old, for, daily on the neighbouring downs and grassy hill-
sides, I find that I can still in reason walk any distance, jump
over anything, and climb up anywhere; but, that the sound of the
ocean seems to have become so customary to my musings, and other
realities seem so to have gone aboard ship and floated away over
the horizon, that, for aught I will undertake to the contrary, I am
the enchanted son of the King my father, shut up in a tower on the
sea-shore, for protection against an old she-goblin who insisted on
being my godmother, and who foresaw at the font - wonderful
creature! - that I should get into a scrape before I was twenty-
one. I remember to have been in a City (my Royal parent's
dominions, I suppose), and apparently not long ago either, that was
in the dreariest condition. The principal inhabitants had all been
changed into old newspapers, and in that form were preserving their
window-blinds from dust, and wrapping all their smaller household
gods in curl-papers. I walked through gloomy streets where every
house was shut up and newspapered, and where my solitary footsteps
echoed on the deserted pavements. In the public rides there were
no carriages, no horses, no animated existence, but a few sleepy
policemen, and a few adventurous boys taking advantage of the
devastation to swarm up the lamp-posts. In the Westward streets
there was no traffic; in the Westward shops, no business. The
water-patterns which the 'Prentices had trickled out on the
pavements early in the morning, remained uneffaced by human feet.
At the corners of mews, Cochin-China fowls stalked gaunt and
savage; nobody being left in the deserted city (as it appeared to
me), to feed them. Public Houses, where splendid footmen swinging
their legs over gorgeous hammer-cloths beside wigged coachmen were
wont to regale, were silent, and the unused pewter pots shone, too
bright for business, on the shelves. I beheld a Punch's Show
leaning against a wall near Park Lane, as if it had fainted. It
was deserted, and there were none to heed its desolation. In
Belgrave Square I met the last man - an ostler - sitting on a post
in a ragged red waistcoat, eating straw, and mildewing away.
If I recollect the name of the little town, on whose shore this sea
is murmuring - but I am not just now, as I have premised, to be
relied upon for anything - it is Pavilionstone. Within a quarter
of a century, it was a little fishing town, and they do say, that
the time was, when it was a little smuggling town. I have heard
that it was rather famous in the hollands and brandy way, and that
coevally with that reputation the lamplighter's was considered a
bad life at the Assurance Offices. It was observed that if he were
not particular about lighting up, he lived in peace; but that, if
he made the best of the oil-lamps in the steep and narrow streets,
he usually fell over the cliff at an early age. Now, gas and
electricity run to the very water's edge, and the South-Eastern
Railway Company screech at us in the dead of night.
But, the old little fishing and smuggling town remains, and is so
tempting a place for the latter purpose, that I think of going out
some night next week, in a fur cap and a pair of petticoat
trousers, and running an empty tub, as a kind of archaeological
pursuit. Let nobody with corns come to Pavilionstone, for there
are breakneck flights of ragged steps, connecting the principal
streets by back-ways, which will cripple that visitor in half an
hour. These are the ways by which, when I run that tub, I shall
escape. I shall make a Thermopylae of the corner of one of them,
defend it with my cutlass against the coast-guard until my brave
companions have sheered off, then dive into the darkness, and
regain my Susan's arms. In connection with these breakneck steps I
observe some wooden cottages, with tumble-down out-houses, and
back-yards three feet square, adorned with garlands of dried fish,
in one of which (though the General Board of Health might object)
my Susan dwells.
The South-Eastern Company have brought Pavilionstone into such
vogue, with their tidal trains and splendid steam-packets, that a
new Pavilionstone is rising up. I am, myself, of New
Pavilionstone. We are a little mortary and limey at present, but
we are getting on capitally. Indeed, we were getting on so fast,
at one time, that we rather overdid it, and built a street of
shops, the business of which may be expected to arrive in about ten
years. We are sensibly laid out in general; and with a little care
and pains (by no means wanting, so far), shall become a very pretty
place. We ought to be, for our situation is delightful, our air is
delicious, and our breezy hills and downs, carpeted with wild
thyme, and decorated with millions of wild flowers, are, on the
faith of a pedestrian, perfect. In New Pavilionstone we are a
little too much addicted to small windows with more bricks in them
than glass, and we are not over-fanciful in the way of decorative
architecture, and we get unexpected sea-views through cracks in the
street doors; on the whole, however, we are very snug and
comfortable, and well accommodated. But the Home Secretary (if
there be such an officer) cannot too soon shut up the burial-ground
of the old parish church. It is in the midst of us, and
Pavilionstone will get no good of it, if it be too long left alone.
The lion of Pavilionstone is its Great Hotel. A dozen years ago,
going over to Paris by South-Eastern Tidal Steamer, you used to be
dropped upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone Station
(not a junction then), at eleven o'clock on a dark winter's night,
in a roaring wind; and in the howling wilderness outside the
station, was a short omnibus which brought you up by the forehead
the instant you got in at the door; and nobody cared about you, and
you were alone in the world. You bumped over infinite chalk, until
you were turned out at a strange building which had just left off
being a barn without having quite begun to be a house, where nobody
expected your coming, or knew what to do with you when you were
come, and where you were usually blown about, until you happened to
be blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed. At five in
the morning you were blown out of bed, and after a dreary
breakfast, with crumpled company, in the midst of confusion, were
hustled on board a steamboat and lay wretched on deck until you saw
France lunging and surging at you with great vehemence over the
bowsprit.
Now, you come down to Pavilionstone in a free and easy manner, an
irresponsible agent, made over in trust to the South-Eastern
Company, until you get out of the railway-carriage at high-water
mark. If you are crossing by the boat at once, you have nothing to
do but walk on board and be happy there if you can - I can't. If
you are going to our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest
porters under the sun, whose cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome,
shoulder your luggage, drive it off in vans, bowl it away in
trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing athletic games with it. If
you are for public life at our great Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk
into that establishment as if it were your club; and find ready for
you, your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room, billiard-room,
music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a-day (one plain,
one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths. If you want to be bored,
there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday
to Monday in particular, you can be bored (if you like it) through
and through. Should you want to be private at our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, say but the word, look at the list of charges,
choose your floor, name your figure - there you are, established in
your castle, by the day, week, month, or year, innocent of all
comers or goers, unless you have my fancy for walking early in the
morning down the groves of boots and shoes, which so regularly
flourish at all the chamber-doors before breakfast, that it seems
to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in. Are you going
across the Alps, and would you like to air your Italian at our
Great Pavilionstone Hotel? Talk to the Manager - always
conversational, accomplished, and polite. Do you want to be aided,
abetted, comforted, or advised, at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel?
Send for the good landlord, and he is your friend. Should you, or
any one belonging to you, ever be taken ill at our Great
Pavilionstone Hotel, you will not soon forget him or his kind wife.
And when you pay your bill at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, you
will not be put out of humour by anything you find in it.
A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a
noble place. But no such inn would have been equal to the
reception of four or five hundred people, all of them wet through,
and half of them dead sick, every day in the year. This is where
we shine, in our Pavilionstone Hotel. Again - who, coming and
going, pitching and tossing, boating and training, hurrying in, and
flying out, could ever have calculated the fees to be paid at an
old-fashioned house? In our Pavilionstone Hotel vocabulary, there
is no such word as fee. Everything is done for you; every service
is provided at a fixed and reasonable charge; all the prices are
hung up in all the rooms; and you can make out your own bill
beforehand, as well as the book-keeper.
In the case of your being a pictorial artist, desirous of studying
at small expense the physiognomies and beards of different nations,
come, on receipt of this, to Pavilionstone. You shall find all the
nations of the earth, and all the styles of shaving and not
shaving, hair cutting and hair letting alone, for ever flowing
through our hotel. Couriers you shall see by hundreds; fat
leathern bags for five-franc pieces, closing with violent snaps,
like discharges of fire-arms, by thousands; more luggage in a
morning than, fifty years ago, all Europe saw in a week. Looking
at trains, steamboats, sick travellers, and luggage, is our great
Pavilionstone recreation. We are not strong in other public
amusements. We have a Literary and Scientific Institution, and we
have a Working Men's Institution - may it hold many gipsy holidays
in summer fields, with the kettle boiling, the band of music
playing, and the people dancing; and may I be on the hill-side,
looking on with pleasure at a wholesome sight too rare in England!
- and we have two or three churches, and more chapels than I have
yet added up. But public amusements are scarce with us. If a poor
theatrical manager comes with his company to give us, in a loft,
Mary Bax, or the Murder on the Sand Hills, we don't care much for
him - starve him out, in fact. We take more kindly to wax-work,
especially if it moves; in which case it keeps much clearer of the
second commandment than when it is still. Cooke's Circus (Mr.
Cooke is my friend, and always leaves a good name behind him) gives
us only a night in passing through. Nor does the travelling
menagerie think us worth a longer visit. It gave us a look-in the
other day, bringing with it the residentiary van with the stained
glass windows, which Her Majesty kept ready-made at Windsor Castle,
until she found a suitable opportunity of submitting it for the
proprietor's acceptance. I brought away five wonderments from this
exhibition. I have wondered ever since, Whether the beasts ever do
get used to those small places of confinement; Whether the monkeys
have that very horrible flavour in their free state; Whether wild
animals have a natural ear for time and tune, and therefore every
four-footed creature began to howl in despair when the band began
to play; What the giraffe does with his neck when his cart is shut
up; and, Whether the elephant feels ashamed of himself when he is
brought out of his den to stand on his head in the presence of the
whole Collection.
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